Maybe it's because all of our schools are public?
For example higher ed. providers are funded based on enrollment and rate of graduation. If someone does not graduate, significant chunk (20-30%) of money won't be paid at all. This creates some incentive for the institution to actually guide and see that people don't fall through all kinds of cracks. I guess it's necessary when there is no ordinary paying customer relationship involved.
> Maybe it's because all of our schools are public?
There are Asian countries where this model has failed. Perhaps because of population pressure or other social factors. But I truly like the Nordic way of life.
My experience in the U.S. is that public universities aren't much different from private universities (at least the nonprofit ones) on these kinds of policies. They might be better in other respects, such as lower tuition, but they're run by similar kinds of administrators. Often literally the same administrators: there's a lot of churn as people hop between institutions.
The main problem, in my view, is the professionalization of this institution-hopping class of university administrators. It used to be made up of senior faculty who got promoted to Dean, but now it's made up of an entirely separate group of people, often people who come from business management backgrounds, and who have little grounding in a particular institution's traditions or culture. They tend to think rather differently, in a more locked-down, policy-driven way, and apply broad "best practices" without much regard for how things are done in a particular place. Universities end up getting managed like a corporation, with similar kinds of policies.
Things are a bit better at small colleges (Rose-Hulman, Olin, Harvey Mudd, Wesleyan, Pomona, Colgate, etc.), which typically have much lighter-weight administration and a more pro-student, pro-experimentation attitude, as well as more success in en-culturating their administrators so they "get" the local culture and work with it. But they don't scale very well (I say this despite having gone to one and being a big fan of the undergraduate-college model).
How do you prevent the schools from just lowering graduation requirements in order to artificially boost the percent of graduates and get a better payout?
Since they are either fully government funded or jointly funded with municipalities, there are no incentives to search short term profits by running diploma mills.
Ministry of Education controls the money and conducts yearly performance target negotiations bilaterally with each higher education institution. You actually need a permit from the ministry to run any kind of school. Even our few "private" primary and secondary schools are publicly funded and regulated accordingly.
Independent expert body FINHEEC audits universities quality management schemes regularly. Some European countries use accreditation-based evaluation (for single degree programs) instead of system wide audits. At least one Finnish university has also acquired ISO 9001 cert, but it was seen as more labor intensive and not providing the same benefits (benchmarking, benchlearning) as the required peer-based audits.
Well, that is a problem. But universities also doesn't want to be known for poor quality. And then there is pretty strong government oversight. In Sweden the National Agency for Higher Education do regular audits and have the right to remove a schools privilege to award degrees.
Maybe it's because all of our schools are public? For example higher ed. providers are funded based on enrollment and rate of graduation. If someone does not graduate, significant chunk (20-30%) of money won't be paid at all. This creates some incentive for the institution to actually guide and see that people don't fall through all kinds of cracks. I guess it's necessary when there is no ordinary paying customer relationship involved.
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